About twenty years ago, the Princeton Corridor Rotary Club decided that it was time to begin the formal documentation of the history of one of central New Jersey’s most important areas: West Windsor Township.
Few people, if any, claimed that West Windsor was as important as Princeton, but many felt it was significant, nonetheless, and so a major effort was made to organize and report on its two-centuries of history.
To implement this idea, Barbara Evans, who was the Secretary of the Princeton Corridor Rotary Club and also the West Windsor Township Clerk, arranged with historian Henry Innes MacAdam to write and produce a full and complete history of West Windsor in time for its bicentennial celebration in 1997.
That was nearly two decades ago, and it is safe to say that many current residents of West Windsor have either forgotten all about the book or never heard of it in the first place. Here is the story.
The book is “West Windsor, Then and Now, by Henry Innes MacAdam.” It contains 116 pages with a format of 8-1/2 X 11 inches. At the time it was published in 1997, it was distributed widely in West Windsor and nearby areas. To be honest, I don’t recall what it cost at the time. (Today, I’ve seen a copy available on the internet for $26.95.) It was published by The Princeton Corridor Rotary Club.
The book begins with an extensive description of the geology of this part of central New Jersey and the Millstone River valley in particular. As I have mentioned many times, it is the Millstone River that forms the boundary between West Windsor and Plainsboro townships. MacAdam explains how organizations such as the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association have been instrumental in determining the geological history of the area and implementing plans to help preserve it.
Also important to the description of the West Windsor area are its archaeology and anthropology. Included in the book are references to “prehistoric occupation of this part of Central New Jersey.” In fact it was the discovery of artifacts attributed to Native Americans in the area that contributed to the failure of the Millstone Bypass idea to reduce traffic at the traffic circle at Route 1 and Washington Road. It’s been a few years since that issue was under discussion, and the present status of traffic there seems to be under control.
As for the important features of the West Windsor landscape, I have discussed some of these before, including the presence of the many small streams in the area and the flatness of its terrain. But to provide more detail on the history of the terrain we have, it would be useful to quote from the description given in MacAdam’s book:
“The district we now call West Windsor first witnessed human settlement at about the same time that the great glaciers of the northern hemisphere responded to an earlier era of global warming and began to melt. The retreating icefields left great swaths of landscape with characteristic features which can now be charted in our region. From the Middle Atlantic States northward toward what became the Great Lakes this massive ‘meltdown’ continued for centuries, eventually thawing the monstrous sheets of ice through to Canada and beyond, ultimately to the frozen wastes of today’s Arctic region where remnants of the last Ice Age still linger.”
The book provides much more of this fascinating account of West Windsor’s geological history and then moves on to the first human habitation of the area. Naturally, this includes the sequence of events that led to the use of the area for farming to support that population.
It’s interesting to realize that two of the present boundaries of West Windsor follow the natural ones traced by the Millstone River and Stony Brook. And, of course, one of the main boundaries of Plainsboro is that same Millstone River.
A very important part of West Windsor’s history is the ownership of the land and the role it played during the early history that included the American Revolutionary War. Much of the New Jersey area had belonged to William Penn as of 1693, and on his death in 1718 it was inherited by his three sons. But before Penn and other Europeans settled in the area, the native population was what was later referred to as the Lenape.
An important feature of the West Windsor story as told in this book is the way it is divided into chapters that treat important era’s of its history and development. These chapters are titled: Exploration, Formation, Consolidation, and Assimilation.
The chapter on exploration deals with the time when much of eastern North America was being settled by Europeans, a time often referred to as the “Colonial” era. “Formation” refers to the transformation of the area to a legally constituted part of what became the United States following the Revolutionary War. The chapter “Consolidation” has the subtitle “Families, Faith, and Farmsteads” which aptly describes what happened in what became West Windsor during the time leading up to the mid-twentieth cintury. “Assimilation” discusses how West Windsor became and continues to be assimilated with the its surroundings. An mporatant section of that chapter is “Government, Social Issues, and Education.”
All told, West Windsor, Then and Now is a remarkably thorough presentation of the local community as it existed at the time of its 200th anniversary a couple of decades ago. For anyone who has not seen it or does not own a copy, I recommend it without hesitation. For those who are relucatant to read history because of its possible political slant, don’t worry, this book is as non-political as a book can be.
looking back,
